FAMILY ALBUM
THE TIMES OF MELVILLE AND WHITMAN. By Von Wyck Brooks. E. P.
Dutton
&
Co. $5.00.
With the publication of this volume Mr. Brooks takes himself
entirely beyond the reach of the opinion, usually uttered with a mournful
acerbity, that his work has fallen away from the fine critical intelligence
of his early days. For it is clear from
The Times of Melville and Whitman,
if it was ever left in doubt by the earlier volumes of his account of
American literature, that Mr. Brooks is not writing literary criticism
at all and does not want to. Nor does he want to write literary history
as that is usually understood. As for intelligence, he is not concerned
with it. One has the impulse to describe his enterprise as an act of
piety-until one remembers that
in
some sense every literary act is an
act of piety, a commemoration of saints and heroes and an alliance with
them, and that acts of piety can also be acts of intelligence. One must
say then that Mr. Brooks is engaged in an act of piety of a particular,
of a very simple, sort: an act of family piety.
The very rhetoric proclaims the nature of the enterprise. Mr.
Brooks has perfectly assumed the character of that member
of
the family
who holds in proud and capacious memory every last fact of family
existence; it is not that such a person has no ability to select but that
he has no wish to select-the more anecdotes, portraits, letters, muni–
ments, eccentricities, candlesticks, silver thimbles, hunting crops, and
Malay krises he can collect the more he can make the family resemble
a nation or a universe, the more he can be sure it is really there, for the
family, considered as a long continuity, is always threatening to show
itself as a mere figment. Hence Mr. Brooks's concern with simultaneity:
"When General Lee died
in
1870 with three of the older Southern
writers...."-it is not a death-pact but a reassuring reticulation of
event, the family web made that much finer. As happens with every
family historian, in the degree that Mr. Brooks remembers his ante–
cedents, his pronouns forget theirs:
Major John Richardson, the author of
Wacousta,
the best of the Canadian
novelists, was outside the circle, the disciple of Cooper who died in New York,
a pauper, forgotten even at home, after selling his faithful dog for a morsel to
live on. He was buried in an unknown grave in 1852, the year in which William
North arrived from England, the journalist who had studied in Germany at one
of the universities and whose style was full of German metaphysics. He had
published a novel attacking Disraeli, entitled
Anti-Coningsby.
... At twenty-eight
he killed himself with a draught of prussic acid, and a few years later Stephen
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